Prior to his death, Harry Houdini shared a message with his wife. “Rosabelle – answer – tell – pray – answer – look – tell – answer – answer – tell.” The first word was a reference to a popular song Bess Houdini (née Rahner) sung in her vaudeville act when the two performers met. The number remained a favorite for the pair, and was eventually inscribed on her wedding band. The remainder of the words represented a code, spelling out the word “B-E-L-I-E-V-E.”
Bess held a seance each year, following her husband’s death from a ruptured appendix in 1926. If a medium leading the event was indeed legitimate, the message would be passed to her from beyond the grave. After failing to receive the words for a decade, she ended the practice, reportedly stating, “10 years is long enough to wait for any man.”
It was almost certainly exactly how Houdini expected things to play out.
The magician was a longtime critic of Spiritualism, a movement born in the middle of the 19th century that reached a fever pitch the 1920s, as the world suffered tremendous casualties in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic and first World War. Personal loss from both of these events helped make Arthur Conan Doyle one of the world’s leading proponents of the movement. During the period, the author believed a medium helped him contact his son a half-dozen times and younger brother twice.
The two men met in 1920, when the magician performed at Brighton’s Hippodrome. Houdini invited Doyle to the show and Doyle and wife Jean invited Houdini back to their home, he performed card tricks for the author’s three young children. Aware that Houdini was still mourning the 1913 death of his mother, Doyle recommended he pay a visit to Annie Brittain, then arguably England’s best-known medium.
The experience with Brittain left Houdini unmoved. Early in his career, the magician had performed his own elaborately orchestrated seances, leaving him well-acquainted with the tricks of the trade. He kept his feelings to himself and he and Doyle remained penpals and friends. But Houdini’s deep skepticism of Doyle’s strongly-held believes would ultimately cause a rift between the two men that lasted until the former’s death.
Two years after their first meeting, Doyle arranged for a seance in an Atlantic City hotel room that aimed to reunite Houdini with his beloved mother. The proceedings were led by Jean, herself a medium practiced in the phenomenon of automatic writing, wherein an individual possessing psychic abilities is able to channel text through supernatural sources. The seance generated 15 pages, written in Jean’s hand, which Houdini was quick to reject, owning to — among things — the fact that his own mother barely spoke a word of English during her life.
In 1924, another Doyle-backed medium, Margery Crandon, rose to international fame as a finalist for a Scientific American contest awarding $5,000 to anyone who offered proof of life after death. Crandon’s approach was unorthodox, often performing naked and thrusting herself into the laps of those present. On at least one occasion, she was reported to have issued ectoplasm from her vagina.
Concerned that she would win the contest, Houdini called Crandon’s bluff, attending multiple seances and exposing a trick wherein she secretly rang an electric bell with her leg. Crandon agreed to perform a subsequent seance with her legs restricted by a large cabinet-like device. With the lights out, the bell rang out again. A quick investigation revealed that she had broken free of the device and manually triggered the sound a second time.
Of Crandon, Houdini wrote, “My decision is that everything which took place at the seances which I attended was a deliberate and conscious fraud.” After attending 100 seances, the magazin’s team of scientists concurred. Crandon was not awarded the prize, which was eventually raised up to $15,000.
Doyle’s convictions remained unshaken. A former medical doctor best known for creating fiction’s most prominent rationalist, he spent much of the final 14 years of his life lecturing and spreading the gospel of spiritualism, a phenomenon he described as “the most important thing in the world.”
Writing in 1925, five years before his own death, Doyle noted, “We who believe in the psychic revelation, and who appreciate that a perception of these things is of the utmost importance, certainly have hurled ourselves against the obstinacy of our time. Possibly we have allowed some of our lives to be gnawed away in what for the moment seemed a vain and thankless quest. Only the future can show whether the sacrifice was worth it.”
Sources:
Scientific American vs. the Supernatural https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-vs-the-supernatural/
Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle: a friendship split by spiritualism https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/10/houdini-and-conan-doyle-impossible-edinburgh-festival
Mina Crandon & Harry Houdini: The Medium and The Magician https://www.historynet.com/mina-crandon-harry-houdini-the-medium-and-the-magician.htm
The Most Important Thing in the World https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/spiritualist